The latest on what's happening under our umbrella!

Film

01/12/2013

Animism: The Gods' Lake (APTN/Z2H Studios), which we worked on last year (director: Jericca Cleland) is now broadcasting on APTN. The show premiered this week and broadcasts on Wednesdays at 8 (PST) and repeats Saturdays at 5:30 (PST).

Drawing on ancient First Nations mythology, the show is a
contemporary mix of tech meets magic in highly stylized animation and
evocative artwork. The series tells the story of Mel Ravensfall, who,
unbeknownst to her, has been chosen by the Trickster to be his emissary.
As her powers begin to manifest and she steps deeper through the veil
between worlds, Mel and her friends are swept up in the climax of an
endless cycle: once again, it is the Time of Change, but this time, the
fate of humanity and its future lies in the hands of one disenfranchised
teen.

09/06/2012

Our friends at Danish studio Noerlum do this awesome thing every year called Team Generous... They gather a group together for a couple of weeks with a creative or technical challenge in mind and make a pro bono short film for a worthy organization. How cool is that?

We are discussing collaborating with Noerlum on a future Team Generous project, as Twenty One Inc shares their interest and commitment to creative collaboration and using our amazing medium to spread great messages in support of strong causes. If you're interested in getting involved, please let us know!

07/17/2012

As most of you know, I'm a huge fan of short films and a big believer in the power of story to communicate, illuminate, and shift our understanding and world view. It is with great pleasure that we are participating in the outreach and distribution of Anne Leonard's The Story of Stuff Project shorts. The newest one, The Story of Change, is released today!

Can shopping save the world?The Story of Change urges viewers to put down their credit cards and start exercising their citizen muscles to build a more sustainable, just and fulfilling world.

This article (published in June's Canadian Cinematographer magazine) provided a refreshing opportunity to restate what I've long believed-- that the visual storytelling tools of space, lenses, motion, staging, composition, lighting, and focus are essential to bringing strong stories to life on any screen and that the role of the cinematographer is a vital one in any medium. It's a bit of a cinematography-geek article, but for those of you who are interested, read on!

Many thanks to Fanen and to the CSC for publishing this and allowing me to repost it here.

To quote the 5D philosophy, worldbuilding is a “metaphor for the design and iteration process, creating and actualizing the story space in digital narrative media. It addresses the design thinking, the process, and the experience of creating new worlds for storytelling.”

The conference opened with a fantastic talk by Tom Wujec (Fellow, Autodesk), who posed an interesting question regarding the effects of exponential technological growth on creativity. If I’d been worried about work keeping me too busy to be in touch with major advancements, his mind-blowing examples confirmed it. A LOT has been changing incredibly rapidly and we all need to ponder his astute question.

Tom also quoted that creativity is the set of skills and processes that carry us from a moment of epiphany (ah-ha!) to the end result of innovative expression. So how does technology effect and enhance our creative process? Does its exponential growth allow us to be more creative, more efficient in our creativity, or simply result in us being more overwhelmed? Probably all three. But being an optimist, I prefer to see the whole as a positive, growing trend.

To quote another panelist, Rick Carter (Production Designer: Avatar), being overwhelmed is not necessarily a bad thing. He brought to mind the image from Pinocchio, of the fairy emerging out of whiteness, out of a nothing which is everything, to create the manifestation of a wish, of a dream in tangible, conscience-driven form. As filmmakers, imagemakers, storytellers, don’t we do that every day? And doesn’t the state of being overwhelmed sometimes lead us to a blankness that contains everything, inspiring new thought, innovation, and spectacular opportunity for creativity?

The first evening in the series dealt with inception, or how ideas are born and how we spark our creativity, with a lively and philosophical conversation between panelists Rick Carter, Michael Wilkinson (Costume Designer: Man of Steel, 300), Tom Wujec, and Rick Jaffa (Screenwriter, Rise of the Planet of the Apes).

What resonated most for me was that starting from character and story, we have the opportunity to develop an elemental metaphor that expresses the story’s main theme or the main character’s journey. This metaphor or core image then becomes something that can guide the cinematic design, exploring its expression through every creative voice in the film—colour, movement, composition, space, texture, light, editorial pacing, sound, silence, dialogue, music, gesture, expression, etc. This cinematic design provides a framework for collaboration, creative play, and unified vision between the director, production designer, cinematographer, editor, writer, and other creative keys as the film evolves.

Ultimately, we all agreed on several key points—that world building provides a rich and evolving source of inspiration for story and narrative, often spanning much more than the film or creative vision that initially motivated its creation, that cinematic design allows the director to guide the overall vision in service of story and final expression through collaboration with all of the creative keys within that world, and that the future of narrative story-telling based in any given well-developed world has the potential to be expressed through a wide variety of media and products, from films, to television shows, to games, to books, social media installations, and beyond.

Practically speaking, I find this all incredibly exciting, and I feel that previsualization (or visualization or prototyping) is a perfect space in which to exercise this creativity and enable it to flourish. It gives us a common ground to play in, concrete imagery to respond to, and context to work within while supporting change, organic evolution of ideas, and progressive refinement of the vision. The future of compelling and strongly unified storytelling is bright!

11/18/2011

This also happens to be what I (Jericca Cleland csc) spent most of the year working on... I started on the film about a year ago, when Twenty One Inc was contracted to do some previsualization. Twenty One Inc Previs Supervisor Zondac Gibson and I went down to LA to work with Sony Imageworks, who handled production of the film.

Soon after, I was asked to join the film as the cinematographer, establishing the filming style and designing the camerawork, lens palette, staging, and compositions in collaboration with director Sarah Smith, head of layout Dave Morehead, the camera crew, and the other creative keys.

Twenty One Inc provided the CG camera rig that enabled us to achieve most of the big, sweeping camera rig movement and the animated handheld camera movement. Anthony Di Ninno, a senior previs/camera artist who has worked closely with me and with Twenty One Inc on a number of feature projects, joined the camera crew and made a significant contribution to the styling of the camera work. We also shot a fair amount using Sony's virtual camera system, which allowed us to operate a camera physically and use motion capture to bring the performance into the CG world. The whole camera department pulled together and worked incredibly hard to create the roughly 2000 shots in the film (thank you thank you!!).

(Official 'Waker Scene' Clip)

I have not been so motivated and inspired by a great story since working on Toy Story 2 and Finding Nemo at Pixar... This film is exciting and funny and smart while maintaining a lot of underdog charm and British wit. I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with both Sony and Aardman on the project and to have built relationships and worked alongside such dedicated and hard-working people. The production was challenging on many levels and took tremendous effort to complete (congratulations, everyone!). The result, I hope, you will find worthwhile... and a bit of a holiday treat! Enjoy!!

08/10/2011

The major annual conference for SIGGRAPH is happening in Vancouver this year, held at the Convention Centre at Canada Place. The conference started Sunday and events run through this week; it's expected to draw thousands of computer graphics, animation, and visual effects professionals to the city. Welcome to all the visitors and enjoy!

08/04/2011

This is a common question people ask when I refer to cinematic design in speaking about my work or in lectures about visual storytelling, cinematography, or previsualization. This term is one I first turned to when developing the filming plan for Finding Nemo to describe the overarching visual story design of a film. And I think it nicely sums up what previsualization can help filmmakers define as they shape the vision of their projects.

For me, cinematic design is the telling of visual story expressed through a unified vision of cinematography, production design, and editorial shape. The cinematic design sets the stage for (and responds to) performance. If you're trying to tell a visually strong and compelling story, it's vital to consider the end product as a cohesive whole, such that the individual parts work together to strengthen the message and emotion. Cinematic design is like a visual score for a film. In the way that the score and sound design of a film support and relate to the story through the interplay of various voices, instruments, sounds, musical themes, and silence, cinematic design defines the orchestration of visual themes and arrangement of the various visual storytelling voices.

In listening to a successful piece of music, we are usually unconscious of each individual voice or sound component, because the interplay and tuning of their contributions is what is so powerful and moving. A composer carefully develops and structures themes, determines the arrangement of instruments to play them, and conducts a group of musicians to shape the tempo, volume, and intensity as appropriate for the performance, for the desired mood, emotion, and creative expression. This is not so different from the phases we take a film through—development (composing), preproduction (arranging), and conducting a performance (production). In music, we never imagine the elements of an orchestra working discretely or sequentially—of course musicians practice their craft individually and sections practice their parts, but an orchestra and its conductor remain focused on the whole from the perspective of the final execution, making it the best it can be.

I frequently hear people say they don't like "rules". There's a big difference between "rules" and design. A painting with no design and every colour thrown in is hardly communicative, evocative, or good on virtually any scale. Cinematic design is similar-- it emphasizes consciously selecting and architecting an overall style and palette for the film, but not one restricted just to colour-- rather, a palette taking into consideration all the myriad of applicable visual devices: line, colour, shape, space, lens, staging, quantity of light, quality of light, movement, eye fix, editorial pacing, etc., and determining which will dominate and which will be used specifically to underscore the emotion and story. It is the composition of story-enhancing visual themes and the basic arrangement of how the visual storytelling voices will work together during production to create a unified and compelling final performance.

This is a subtle, powerful, and often-overlooked aspect of filmmaking. As I often heard during my years at Pixar-- if it's in the frame, it's on the screen, and it should strengthen the story. And doing that takes planning and structure-- cinematic design.

08/01/2011

If you like the thrill of supernatural horror films or if you've enjoyed the other four chapters in this series of suspenseful flicks, you should check out Warner Brothers' upcoming feature Final Destination 5.

Directed by Steven Quale and shot in 3D, Final Destination 5 will be in theatres August 12. Twenty One Inc contributed to the previsualization of the movie, particularly the gymnastics sequence, the laser surgery sequence, the factory sequence, and final climactic sequence. Warning: not for the faint of heart...

Helmed by Pixar veteran cinematographer and live-action filmmaker Jericca Cleland, Twenty One Inc is a development & preproduction studio offering dynamic, high-quality previsualization services for live-action and animated films, tv, games, and commercials. Do more with less!